Opinion: 100 days of Trump has been all pain, no gain for Wisconsin

Turns out cutting veterans’ health care, healthy food for low-income families, childcare programs, library and museum funding, cancer research, and humanitarian aid isn’t making America great again.

On his 100th day back in office, President Donald Trump awoke to election results out of Canada. He lost—indirectly, but it was a loss just the same. And that surprise from up north might guide Wisconsin and the rest of America in its handling of the remaining 1,362 days of Trump Part Deux.

The previous 99 days can be fairly described as all pain and no gains: Hundreds of thousands of federal job losses—bringing hardship to people, including Wisconsin veterans; an erratic trade war that’s devastating Wisconsin workers, particularly our farmers; and chaos and instability in the financial markets, which has put the retirement security of millions of Americans at risk. 

In the wake of all of this, Wisconsin home sales were down 10% last month compared to a year ago.

And in a development that isn’t nearly as personal to the average American, but arguably as serious, Congress is comatose—its once-boisterous Republican leaders reduced to supplicants who don’t dare offend their party leader by engaging in the oversight our nation’s Founders handed them as a way to ward off the attacks on democracy—the kind we now see daily, even in a Milwaukee courthouse.

Is anyone expecting Sen. Ron Johnson to offer help? He’s busy chasing 9/11 conspiracy theories again. US Rep. Derrick Van Orden is literally screaming false denials about cutting food aid. US Rep. Tony Wied held a “tele town hall” that constituents derided as more performative than informative. And the president himself? He’s displayed a lack of care for Americans’ economic struggles  that’s par for the course for someone who has spent 12 of the first 14 weekends of his presidency at one of his many elite, membership-only properties, usually golfing.

This isn’t what he promised

There are those who say Trump is doing exactly what he promised, especially the part where he said, “I will be your retribution.” That’s the kind of raw meat his most committed supporters devour with gusto, but his message to mainstream America was centered on economic responsibility. This whole “DOGE” thing started with what many voters thought were good intentions. 

“I will create a Government Efficiency Commission tasked with conducting a complete financial performance and audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms,” he told the New York Economic Club last September. 

Sounds harmless, right? Everyone can probably identify something they would consider wasteful spending.

But veterans’ health care? Healthy food for low-income families? An education for our most vulnerable children through Head Start? Public health in our state? A UW-Madison study to figure out how the COVID-19 virus replicates in order to improve future vaccines? Putting local farm food in local school lunches? Farmland conservation? Wisconsin libraries and museums? Lowering utility bills and reducing pollution to assist our climate? Jobs at the National Weather Service and the Environmental Protection Agency? Cancer research? Humanitarian aid?

Suspending FDA testing on milk?? Does he have any idea what that means to America’s Dairyland?

We could go on, of course. But here’s the point: There is no point. 

The administration hasn’t yet shown how all of this chaos is supposed to make things better for the economy and our lives anytime soon. And it’s not as if all of this “savings” will be put into our pockets. It’s all meant to offset massive tax cuts weighted toward the massively wealthy. 

If this has become obvious in the first 100 days, one can only imagine what things might be like by Day 200 – unless this president sees a perpetual public pushback against things voters surely did not vote for.

O Canada!

Trump has never polled overwhelmingly on the positive side, but even with a lowered bar, Trump is in a slump. His unpopularity is evident not only in opinion polling, but at polling places. Anger at his early second term actions could be seen in Justice-elect Susan Crawford’s win in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election earlier this month. And now voters in Canada have delivered a direct rebuke.

Months of Trump insults, tariffs, and jokes about annexing Canada helped reverse what pundits initially expected in Monday’s national elections. When the votes were counted, the Liberal party not only avoided electoral catastrophe, as had long been predicted prior to Trump’s attacks on Canada, but nearly won an outright majority in Parliament. Prime Minister Mark Carney won by taking the fight directly to Trump and emphasizing national sovereignty. 

“We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” Carney said in his victory speech, telling supporters in Ottawa that the mutually beneficial system Canada and the US had shared since World War II had ended.

The Takeaway

For the people on this side of the border who have organized or taken part in an ongoing series of demonstrations big and small, the result is a reminder that the general public does not follow politics on a daily basis—and the only way to remind them of Trump’s true record of all pain and no plan is to never stop making it a public issue.